The term “handguns” relates to pistols, e.g., blowback operated weapons, or gas operated weapons, guns, and the like. The invention will be described by means of the example of a handgun, although the present invention is not limited to the latter and might just as well be implemented in long guns.
It is known to equip firearms with a silencer in order to reduce noise emission, which emanates from gases escaping upon a gunshot from the muzzle expanding explosively and being under high pressure.
Silencers can be screwed onto a front end of the gun barrel. Such a silencer is, for example, known from DE 42 31 183 C1.
With respect to handguns with a fixed barrel, the silencer only causes slight problems concerning the self-loading function of the gun.
With respect to handguns with a movable barrel, the maintenance of the self-loading function of the gun has been found to be problematic. This is because a silencer screwed onto the barrel or the breech increases the mass which is returned during a shot, whereby the return velocity decreases from the barrel to the breech. This may result in the self-loading function of the gun either being stopped completely, or functional disorders occurring, because, for example, the ejection of the empty cartridge and/or the supply of a new cartridge may only take place incompletely and the gun does no longer lock completely. This is specifically problematic with respect to guns, which have a rearward-moving and pivoting barrel (Browning principle), because here, the silencer also still has to be raised.
In practice, it has been tried to solve this problem by more light-weight or smaller silencers. This, however, has the disadvantage that with correspondingly light-weight silencers, the stability of the silencer decreases, and that with respect to smaller silencers, the sound-absorbing effect occasionally may deteriorate substantially.
A solution for this problem is, to instead of connecting the silencer and the gun barrel to each other rigidly, to rather arrange a so-called pulse generator between the silencer and the gun barrel, which on the one hand, is connected to the silencer, and on the other hand is connected to the gun barrel, and which allows for an axial movement of the gun barrel relative to the silencer. Thus, by means of the pulse generator, the gun barrel is decoupled from the silencer such that the self-loading function of the gun despite the silencer is ensured as far as possible.
The use of pulse generators, however, has the disadvantage that these may easily get dirty and/or damages at the threads of the pulse generator may lead to impairment of the function of the gun. Moreover, the production of the pulse generator is relatively complex and expensive, which negatively affects the price of a silencer.
For silencers, which are screwed directly onto the front end of the gun barrel as well as for silencers, which are fixed to the end of the gun barrel via a pulse generator, it is disadvantageous that the mounting of the silencer as well as the demounting of the silencer takes relatively much time. Further, during screwing of the silencer, it always has to be ensured that the latter is fixedly screwed.